The company's remaining co-founder, Mark Chudzicki, is leaving in April to possibly start another company.

CEO Lorren Elkins, a Delmar native with a career that includes 17 years at The New York Times, started March 8 at PowerOne, which makes online software products for the newspaper industry.

Elkins started his first day at 7 a.m., meeting throughout the day with employees over coffee and doughnuts at the North Greenbush headquarters. He learned about their jobs and their goals for the company.

"It has been two parts listening and one part talking since I got here," Elkins said.

So far, he likes what he has heard.

"I'm hearing how excited people are to move down a new path. I'm hearing people want to make this company a true success, to get to the next level where they truly are leading the industry," Elkins said. "I kind of feel like the piano's been put on my back."

Elkins said he's ready to do some heavy lifting. He is the company's fourth CEO since it was formed from the merger of PowerAdz.com and AdOne LLC in 2001. Chudzicki, CEO of PowerAdz and Brendan Burns, the CEO of AdOne, were co-CEOs until September 2003, when the firm ditched the co-CEO approach. Board chairman J. Markham Green was named interim CEO.

PowerOne hosts the largest online newspaper network in the United States and makes products that allow newspapers to put their print editions online, among other things. The company has more than 1,000 newspaper clients.

Elkins has 23 years in the publishing industry, including a stint as publisher of the Harvard Crimson, and management experience at Unicast and The New York Times.

At The New York Times, Elkins worked in several departments, including circulation, marketing, planning, advertising and technology. He built the company's database and developed a classified product. He also ran the home delivery system with a staff of 1,400 people.

"I think his experience is as close to perfect for this job as you can get," Chudzicki said. "He has a very strong media-company background on both the print and online side. He has a strong technology background, strong sales and marketing background and he has been part of small media and dot-com companies."

Elkins agreed.

"Because of that, I came in yesterday firing on all cylinders," he said. "There's not a whole lot I need to be trained on."

Elkins joins the company six months after it merged with the owner of classified software developers Careersite and Employment Wizard, and acquired The Center for American Jobs, a call-in resume-builder.

He'll be leading a work force of 170 employees in five locations, the company's peak head count.

Elkins said he is impressed with where PowerOne is today, and that it survived the Internet bubble-burst.

"The fact that this company is still around and has many, many clients in the newspaper industry in and of itself is a success story," Elkins said. "The companies left standing today are generally ones that have been successful. PowerOne Media is one of those companies."

But, Elkins said, PowerOne can't rest on its past achievements.

"It has gotten to where it is today by building very, very valuable technologies that many newspapers have used, bought and deployed. I believe the next level for this company is to go beyond being a technology company. We need to become a company that provides marketing and sales solutions for the needs of the newspaper industry."

He said Internet pure-plays--companies that are based on the Internet, such as Monster.com--have hurt the bottom lines of newspapers. "[They are] eating their lunches ever so gradually," Elkins said.

Elkins plans to have PowerOne's sales and marketing force work with newspapers to better use PowerOne's technology.

"I've worked at some small newspapers and large newspapers and I can tell you that in the newspaper world, most people put their attention to the print product. Unfortunately, the newspaper industry overall does not market their Internet products as well as they market their print products," he said. "Ad salespeople know how to walk into retail [operations] and talk about cost-per-inch, how to make a headline jump out to the reader and use active words that sell something."

Now, he wants PowerOne to teach its clients how to talk about page views, search results and cost-per-impression--Internet lingo.

Elkins said PowerOne's focus isn't a shift but an evolution. He said PowerOne may also begin targeting the radio and television industries as well.

Bob Godgart, a co-founder of PowerAdz with Chudzicki, left in 2001 to start The Autotask Group LLC, a software developer in East Greenbush.

He likes the direction PowerOne is taking. He hasn't met Elkins yet, but said he has heard a lot about him.

"I've heard some very good things about him," Godgart said. "I've heard he has a good leadership background and a trail of success behind him. I think it will be great for the company to have a new spark plug in there to turbo-charge growth."

Chudzicki is not sure what his own next step will be, although he will be staying in the area.

"I'm an entrepreneur," he said. "I think I'd like to be closer to the ground floor in another company. And I'm comfortable the reins here are being turned over to a top professional manager."